A Drinking Life (37 page)

After I was hired, after they gave me my first Working Press card, I brought my familiar sense of entitlement to the bar of the Page One every morning. Those mornings were free of the limits of time, and I would drink with McMorrow, Grove, Poirier, and others, while fishmongers made deliveries and the day-shift guys showed up for a morning pop before starting at ten. The Page One was the headquarters of the fraternity, a place completely devoid of character except for the men at the bar, a way station for all the whiskey-wounded boomers of the business who passed through on their way from one town’s paper to another. I loved it. I’d taken a cut in pay to work at the
Post
but I didn’t care. I had enough for food, rent, and drink. Each day, after the Page One, I’d take the subway to Astor Place and walk from the station to the flat on Ninth Street, where I’d sleep off the beer, wake up and eat pasta at the Orchidia on the corner of Second Avenue before going off again to the
Post.
My byline was in the paper every day, and I couldn’t wait to go to sleep so that I could wake up and do it all again. On days when I did no drinking, I often couldn’t sleep, as sentences caromed around my brain and I rewrote myself and others. On such days, I often moved to the refrigerator and found a beer.

Everybody in the business was drinking then, the lovely older woman on night rewrite, stars and editors, Murray Kempton and the copyboys. Once, when I was working days, Poirier came to me and said, How do you call in sick if you’re
in?
We laughed and concocted a ludicrous story of eating a bad clam at lunch, and sure enough, at lunch hour, Poirier called in with his bad clam attack and took the rest of the day off. Another day, working overtime during some disaster in the dead of winter, I finished at noon instead of 8
A.M.
and carried my exhaustion directly into the Lexington Avenue IRT, skipping the Page One. Standing in the middle of the subway car, his eyes glassy, a large black Russian-style fur hat making him seem even taller, was McMorrow. He was maintaining his balance with one finger delicately touching the roof of the subway car and he was barking,
Copy! Copyboy!
as strangers edged away from his dangerous presence.

That first newspaper Christmas, there was a staff party in the penthouse office of Dorothy Schiff, the
Post’s
owner. The city editor got drunk and fell down the spiral staircase, breaking his arm. He refused to risk the hazards of a city hospital, saying
I’d rather die here at my desk.
He insisted on being taken to his home in Oyster Bay. So Poirier and I helped him to his car, both of us drunk too, and drove through the frozen night to Oyster Bay. When his wife opened the door and saw her wrecked husband and then saw us, she started shouting at us,
You bastards, you bastards, look what you’ve done to him, you bastards.

One election night, Kempton was in his third-floor office, sending down his copy one sentence at a time, until it was six-thirty in the morning. The night managing editor, George Trow, asked the copyboy to ask Mr. Kempton a simple, if urgent, question: “How much more?” The copyboy ran up the back stairs to the third floor, burst into the office and said to the paper’s greatest columnist: Mr. Trow wants to know, how much more? Kempton lifted his almost-completed bottle of Dewar’s and said, Oh, about an inch.

After working a double shift one Friday, reporting three stories, rewriting three others, and doing captions and overlines for about fifteen photographs, I was reading galleys in the city room. At his desk, Sann was typing fast with two fingers on his Saturday page, a potpourri of news items and smart remarks called “It Happened All Over.” He finished editing it with a pencil, called for a copyboy, rubbed his eyes, and then walked over to me.

Let’s have a drink, you lazy Mick bastard.

We took a cab to midtown and went into a joint called the Spindletop. It was dark and fancy in a sleazy way; if it wasn’t mobbed-up then the decorator had been inspired by gangster movies. Sann ordered whiskey, I asked for a beer. We talked for a while about craft and newspapers and the Boston Celtics, whose coach was his friend. Then:

You got a broad?

No.

Good, Sann said. This business is lousy on women.

I had learned that already. My lovely Dominican was gone, defeated by the hours of the newspaper trade.

But you’re married, I said.

Yeah, to the greatest woman in America. But it hasn’t been easy for her.

I sipped my beer, uneasy about saying anything.

She’s sick now, he said.

I’m sorry to hear that.

She’s
very
sick, he said, as if speaking to himself.

Then he turned and walked to the pay phone. I heard him placing a bet on the Cincinnati Reds. A few more people came into the bar, and then Ike Gellis arrived. He was the sports editor, short and stocky, Edward G. Robinson to Sann’s Bogart.

Where is he? Ike said.

Phone booth.

I bet he’s betting baseball. He’s a fuckin’ degenerate on Fridays.

Sann hung up and came straight to Gellis.

Well, well, the world’s shortest Jew.

I hope you didn’t bet the Reds game, Gellis said. The Giants’ll kill ’em.

Shut up and drink, Sann said.

Two weeks later, early on a Friday morning, Sann’s wife died of cancer. We heard the news about six
A.M
. Around eight, Sann arrived. He walked on his usual hurried way across the city room and went to his desk. He didn’t look at galleys or dupes of stories. He started to type. He typed for more than an hour, worked the copy with a pencil, called for a copyboy, and then got up and walked out of the city room without a word.

Someone passed around a carbon of the story. It was a farewell to his wife. Tough, laconic, underwritten. He never used the word “tragedy.” My friend Al Aronowitz read it and started to weep.

Oh, man, he said. Oh, man.

Aronowitz was a great reporter, a wonderful writer, and a lovely man. But he didn’t drink, so I saw little of him after work. That morning he went to the Page One with me. We drank for a couple of hours in virtual silence. But the booze had no effect.

I don’t know if I can work in this business, Aronowitz said. His wife dies and the first thing he does is come in and write about it.

Shut up and drink, I said.

3

E
ARLY ON
, I learned there were limits to the myth of the hard-drinking reporter. One Saturday night, we threw a big party in the place on Ninth Street. It lasted until dawn. I was due at the
Post
at 1
A.M.
Monday. But when we woke up on Sunday afternoon, Jake and Tim and I were still full of the exuberance of the party. We bought a case of beer and started drinking again. Other people dropped in. The day rolled on, full of laughs and drinks. When I arrived at the
Post
that night, I felt sober, seeing things clearly and thinking lucidly. But I was half-drunk. I must have laughed too loud or bumped against a trash barrel too hard, attracting some notice. Then I started to type and my fingers kept hitting between keys. Finally an editor named Al Davis came over and stood above me and said,
I think you better go home.
I was mortified. Davis was part of the saloon fraternity too; he wasn’t objecting to the drink but to the obvious fact that I couldn’t hold it. I got up and pulled on my coat and he stepped close to me and whispered,
Don’t you ever do this again.
And I didn’t.

But if it was stupid to come into work carrying a package, as we said, that was no reason to stop drinking. As in most things, you needed rules of conduct. I drank in the mornings when I worked nights and at night when I worked days. When I was sent out to cover some fresh homicide, I usually went into a neighborhood bar to find people who knew the dead man or his murdered girlfriend. I talked to cops and firemen in bars and met with petty gangsters in bars. That wasn’t unusual. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, the bars were the clubs of New York’s many hamlets, serving as clearinghouses for news, gossip, jobs. If you were a stranger, you went to the bars to interview members of the local club. As a reporter, your duty was to always order beer and sip it very slowly.

On weekends, I went to Brooklyn to visit my father’s clubs, and to see my mother, my brothers and sister. My mother was proud of my new career, dutifully buying the
Post
every day and clipping my bylined articles. She reminded me that she had bought the
Wonderland of Knowledge
with coupons from the
Post,
in the days before it became a tabloid.

You look very happy, she said.

I am, I said. I am.

In Rattigan’s, there were mixed feelings about what I was doing. In that neighborhood, there were still a lot of people who thought the
Post
was edited by Joe Stalin. Their papers were the
Daily News,
whose editorials kept calling for the nuking of Peking and Moscow, and Hearst’s
Daily Mirror
and
Journal-American.
The
Post
was always attacking the people held sacred by the more pious and patriotic: Cardinal Spellman, Francisco Franco, J. Edgar Hoover, and Walter Winchell.

How’s it going over there, McGee? my father asked one Saturday at the bar in Rattigan’s.

The
Post?
I’m having a great time, Dad.

Good. The checks are clearing, right?

Right.

He sipped his beer and nodded at Dinny Collins, a smart heavy-set man, dying of cirrhosis, who was reading the
Daily News
a few feet away.

What do you think of my stories? I said to my father.

Good, good. Very good. I just . . .

He shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence.

You just what? I said.

Goddammit, I just wish you were working for the
Journal-American!

I laughed out loud, but he didn’t see anything funny.

Dad, the
Journal-American
is a rag. They make things up. I
know.
I’ve covered stories with their reporters, and they make up quotes and details that aren’t
true.

How do
you
know they’re not true?

I told you, Dad. I’ve been there on a story, talking to the same people, seeing the same things. By the time their stories get in the paper they’ve added stuff. Lies. Bullshit.

Dinny Collins leaned over and said, Listen to the kid, Bill. I always said that
Journal-American
was a load of shit.

Especially, I said, when they interview Franco once a year, or Cardinal Spellman three times a year.

You mean they make up stuff for Spellman?

No, I said. In that case, they just print the bullshit.

Collins laughed. But my father gathered his change.

That does it, he said. I’m going to Farrell’s.

Out he went. Collins was still laughing. I ordered a beer.

Don’t take him seriously, Collins said. You’ve made him prouder than hell.

I hope you’re right, Dinny, I said, on my way to a long afternoon in the bars of Brooklyn.

At about seven-thirty in the morning of July 2, 1961, in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway put a twelve-gauge shotgun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. The news was smothered for most of the morning. I heard the first bulletin early that afternoon, while watching the Dodgers play the Phillies on television. I was shaken to the core. Hemingway was still the great bronze god of American literature, the epitome of the hard-drinking macho artist. But since the day in the navy when I’d first read Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to the Viking collection of Hemingway’s work, he had been one of my heroes. No other word could describe him: his writing, his life, his courage, his drinking, were all part of the heroic image. Suicide was not. Suicide, I believed at the time, was the choice of a coward.

But I had little time to mourn Hemingway or even question his motives. The telephone rang. It was Paul Sann.

Get your ass down here, he said. Hemingway knocked himself off, and I want you and Aronowitz to write a series.

The
Post
was famous for its series; one of them — in twenty-three daily installments — had ruined the career of Walter Winchell. The writers were detached from the daily routine and allowed weeks of luxurious reporting and writing on a single subject. I’d never written a series, but Al Aronowitz was a master of the form. He was five years older than I was, heavy, red-bearded, full of sly laughter and dissatisfied melancholy. In his own style, he was struggling as I had struggled over the way to live in the world. He was intoxicated by the careless freedoms of the Beats, about whom he’d written a brilliant series, and pulled in the opposite direction by the demands of a conventional life in the suburbs of New Jersey. For a few years, drinking had helped me postpone a choice; temporarily, at least, newspapers had resolved it. For Aronowitz, newspapers were not enough.

We began working that afternoon in an empty back office. Aronowitz knew almost nothing about Hemingway; I knew almost too much. So we divided the work. I stayed one installment ahead of him, laying out the newspaper clippings, the relevant passages in biographies and monographs, marking passages in Hemingway’s own work that were relevant to the installment. We shared the reporting tasks, calling people all over the country who had known Hemingway. Aronowitz did most of the writing. When he finished each installment, I’d go back over the copy, filling in blanks, cutting statements that seemed ludicrous, trying to separate the myth from the facts. We finished some installments near six in the morning, two hours before the deadline.

When it was over, I knew a lot more about writing. Aronowitz was a generous man, showing me what he was doing and why, passing on his hatred of platitude and cliché. And I’d gone more deeply than ever before into Hemingway. I saw his writing mannerisms more clearly, his personal posturing. Some of it was embarrassing. But I had learned that it was possible to be a great writer and an absolute asshole at the same time. None of us then knew how terrible Hemingway’s final years had been and the extent to which alcohol had contributed to his anguished decline. It was right there on the pages. I just didn’t choose to see it.